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Lawyers, Guns and Money

Lawyers, Guns and Money

Trump’s Enabler White House Counsel

We learned two things yesterday (5-8-2017): the private education that Donald Trump was awarded did not make him a good speller and when confronted with any legal warning or matter, he will stonewall. He learned all his lessons from the late lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn. Some, who know both personalities, would say that Trump is actually channeling Roy.

The Donald is correct, during Sally Yates testimony in front of the Senate Hearing, she did not give us any new facts about what happened. But what she did reveal was a solid timeline that exposes the President’s decision making process when it comes to potential legal threats to his legitimacy.

The acting Attorney General asked for a meeting with the White House Counsel Don McGahn. At two face-to-face meetings, she warned the administration of problems with Michael Flynn. McGahn posed several interesting questions during those encounters.

He wanted to know whether the acting AG had thought Flynn had broken any laws. He also wondered why it was a Department of Justice matter if two administration officials lied to each other. WHAT? And most damaging, he asked if any action they would take would interfere with an on-going investigation. Yates said, “No,” because Flynn had already been interviewed by the FBI.

Clearly McGahn, coincidentally another ‘Donald’, was fishing for answers to whether there was a probe into Flynn. And of course, McGahn is no stranger to the dirty underbelly of Washington politics. Trump may have said he was going to drain the swamp, but kept one of the alligators as legal counsel.

McGahn was Chief Counsel for the RNC for nine years, before George W. Bush appointed him on the Federal Election Committee (FEC), where he had his fingers on how the election process was governed. Don McGahn, as counsel for the RNC, defended Tom DeLay. If you remember, Tom DeLay was indicted and convicted of illegally transferring funds from his campaign to a super PAC in Texas. Rather than get into the lengthy details here which include something about Russian money as well, one might just google: “The DeLay-Abramoff Money Trail.”

That doesn’t mean McGahn should be judged by the clients he’s kept, but he did work for the Koch Brothers’ funded Freedom Partners. In short, Don McGahn is apparently more swamp than Trump and thought to be able to navigate around the alligators at the Justice Department.

In Warren Zevon’s classic song, Lawyers, Guns and Money, the one line sticks out, “Send lawyers, guns, and money, the shit has hit the fan!” And for Trump, “it” seems to keep hitting the twirling reality of Washington. And in some cases, the President seems to be picking the stuff up and throwing it back in himself, like an orange orangutan.

It’s too late for Donald Trump to defend his pal Michael Flynn to the press or the people of this great nation. Even the press secretary keeps saying “the President had made the right decision and we’ve moved on,” but have we? We have lawyers, we have more guns in Afghanistan and we have MONEY involved in everything Trump and his relatives touch.

The two Donald’s waited 18 days to pull the plug on what they knew was a problem. That doesn’t sound like the fantasy character Donald Trump created on the campaign trail. And the whole Flynn-gate affair prompts the question, “If there was no Washington Post article, would Flynn still have his job?” If the answer is yes, then the President is guilty of putting personal loyalties above national security. And this demonstrated a lack of political and business judgement. In business, you cut your losses and move on.

There was a great article written by the National Review’s Tom Rogan that was posted on November 20, 2016, that quoted someone who knows Flynn well, “Flynn had a tendency to bully anyone who disagreed with his assessments on operational strategy.” Boy, that sounds a lot like the man who wanted him by his side for all the big decisions on security. The whole premise of Rogan’s article was that Michael Flynn was the wrong pick for National Security Adviser.

I always look for strange connections that don’t mean anything, like the fact that Don McGahn’s mother is Noreen Rogan and the article was written by a man name Rogan, no relation.

Now, I know our President might brew that into a conspiracy theory that someone born in the UK like Rogan shouldn’t be allowed to write about American politics, but if Trump took the time to read this article back when he was deciding who to appoint for National Security, he would have seen what everyone saw in Flynn. A right-winged whack job who has no business being on the people’s payroll. If only our President could read.